


On the Fixing of Broken Things

by doomedship



Category: Bodyguard (TV 2018)
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-16
Updated: 2018-10-16
Packaged: 2019-08-02 17:24:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16309493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doomedship/pseuds/doomedship
Summary: "Opposites might attract but she can be sure as hell that no one else in her party is coming home to a Labour-voting Glaswegian with someone else's kids and an army tattoo". Julia and David try to make a go of things, out in the real world.





	On the Fixing of Broken Things

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to write something about what I actually think would happen if Julia and David tried to make it work in the real world. It's not light or fluffy, but I hope it's true to them.

Their new life takes some adjustment.  
  
It's an awkward transition, going from PPO and principal to garden variety lovers.   
  
Even when the news blowout has died down, they find themselves struggling to find their feet together, each of them no longer sure where the other stands. There's no protocol and formalities telling them how to behave; there's just the two of them, trying to make it work as real people in the real world, and it's a shaky start.   
  
She finds it strange, spending time with him outside work instead of all being with him all day long, and suddenly, strangely, they're tentative. They've already been through so much together that they're in many ways as intimate as it's possible to get, but in so many others, it's like they've only just met.   
  
He asks what she wants, the first time he comes to her flat after it's all over and he's newly resigned as her PPO. He's wearing jeans and a grey jumper and she finds that strange and intriguing. He's looking at her almost warily, his hands moulded around his glass, and she feels his uncertainty bouncing off her from across the room. This is new ground for her too, but fortunately Julia Montague knows when it's time to lead.  
  
She crosses her kitchen and sits straight down in his lap, catching him by surprise, but she sees the smile spread across his face and she feels a flicker of satisfaction. His arms wind slowly around her waist and he sits back as she places her hands on his shoulders. He waits for her to lean in and brush her lips against his, his lesson long since learnt about who likes to take control. In seconds, she feels the familiar charge building.   
  
"Not strangers after all," she murmurs against his mouth.   
  
"No," he agrees.   
  
"I want this," she says, a belated answer to his question. "I want to be a someone falling for another someone and to hell with the rest of it."   
  
"Good answer," he says to her, and it doesn't take long for ‘this’ to escalate into something more, and they christen her bed as theirs for the very first time.  
  
It's baby steps into this brave new world, and for the most part, it works. At least, when it's safe within these walls, it does.  
  
It's difficult when the rest of the world intrudes.  
  
She's still Home Secretary and it seems everyone's got something to say about her relationship with David Budd. It pains her to admit but she knows it has hurt her credibility. Badly. It is one of the only times she has ever put something for herself above something for her career, and it is a scalding experience for her.   
  
She keeps her position, barely. She's done nothing wrong, not really, but it's embarrassing and it's a scandal all the same, and the sly looks of the men in cabinet with her make her thoughts turn dark on a daily basis. Roger is predictably insufferable, but at least his position was a casualty of the latest leadership campaign and now he finds himself a lowly backbencher once more. When he confronts her about David it has more than the ring of jealous wounded pride about it.  
  
She can handle Roger.  
  
But truths start hitting home. For her, and for David.   
  
"Are you sure this is what you want?" David asks her steadily, holding up the latest edition of the Sun. She looks at her own face staring out of it, blown up side by side with his and an absurd headline accompanying them both.   
  
"Bit late to back out now, don't you think?" she answers, and she throws the paper into her fireplace and pushes him down onto her sofa instead. He smiles but she senses his lingering distraction and she hesitates. She sits astride him and his hands go around her automatically, but she hangs back, waiting for him to reveal what’s on his mind.   
  
"D'you really think this can work?" he asks as he settles his hands on her lower back. She looks down at him pensively, and tangles her fingers in his hair.   
  
"I don't do anything I don't believe in," she says, and he looks up at her sharply. She remembers that he's a Scot and an army vet and the things she believes in are worlds away from where he stands. Suddenly she can feel the weight of the chasm that lies between them. She frowns, gets up, runs a hand through her hair as she moves away.   
  
She wants this to be easier.   
  
"I'm never going to fit into your life," he tells her, coming up behind her. He reaches out, touches one of her hands, just barely.   
  
"Then I'll make my life fit you," she says fiercely, turning around. He looks searchingly at her, gives her the ghost of a smile, full of tender regret.   
  
"I'd never vote for you," he tells her softly, and it's a jolt right through her even though logically it's not a surprise. She looks away.  
  
"And I told you long ago I don't need you to vote for me," she replies, her voice terse, just like it always is when she's backed up against a wall. When she looks back at him she sees sky blue, looking right back at her, melancholy but soft. The shade reminds her of clearer days in spring.   
  
"D'you really see this working out? Do you see yourself turning up to the next Tory conference with me on your arm, and then what? You get in the car with me afterwards to drive to Vicky's house? Get the kids and make them beans on toast and sort their school uniform? It doesn't make any sense, Julia."  
  
He's right, of course. They might as well be from different galaxies, they're so many worlds apart. And the truth is, opposites might attract but she can be sure as hell that no one else in her party is coming home to a Labour-voting Glaswegian with someone else's kids and an army tattoo. It's a walking bad joke and it's a tragedy, and in the thick of it she almost breaks out into desperate laughter.   
  
But instead, she lets his hand drop, turns her back on him. Feels familiar walls of iron and steel go roaring up.   
  
"Well, then," she says. "There's not much left to say to each other, is there?"   
  
"Julia-"  
  
"Just go, please, David," she says sharply, suddenly unable to tolerate his presence in here, in her home, the place she has been slowly starting to think of as theirs.   
  
She hears rather than sees him leave, and she finds she abruptly wishes he hadn't. 

  
.....

  
  
Life doesn't wait for her to feel better.   
  
She gets up and makes it through day to day, doing her job adequately. But for the first time in her life she doesn't strain every fibre of her being to be the best, to bring about change, to fight for her beliefs, however right or wrong the world might condemn her as being. She just gets by.  
  
Time drags, and as she looks down at herself and yet another grey suit, black blouse, she thinks somewhere along the way she's lost her colour.   
  
Some people are pleased by her new-found apathy. That is to say, the current PM and his cronies, still on shaky ground, and Roger somewhere in the background, they revel in her disengagement. She’s no threat when she’s like this. It's lucky, she thinks, that that same disengagement means she doesn't really care.   
  
She hasn't seen him since he walked out that night, all those weeks ago. Five minutes of life, she thinks, just five minutes. That was all it took to send her reeling from such security to utterly broken ground, from partnership to fighting on her own.   
  
It's harder to do that now she's found she's lost her taste for blood.   
  
Soon it’s another Saturday and she's standing at the window with a fresh cup of coffee growing stale forgotten in her hand.   
  
She's distracted by a couple walking down the street, arm in arm. Stands in the shadow while they walk in the sun. She wonders where she got it wrong.   
  
She jumps when her security officer hands her her batch of morning papers, and she sees the way his eyes skirt away from her, avoiding meeting her gaze. She flicks her eyes down to the cover and her face darkens.   
  
JULIA'S LATEST BODYGUARD BLUES, says the column headline. Another dismal article about their split, she thinks. She turns to the page inside and then her fist grips the handle of her mug so tightly her fingers turn white.  
  
There's a picture of him, together with Vicky. No kids, no school run and no birthday party. Just the two of them. Side by side. They could have been the couple she's just seen walking down the street, they could have been anyone, yet this paper thinks somehow the world will care, because of the pain it slyly means to cause her.   
  
Because of how it still makes the bottom fall out of her heart, even after all this time.  
  
A swell of boiling anger builds up in her, unbidden, before she crushes and shackles it down with the rest of the pieces of her heart in someplace inside her she doesn't need to look. A place in the dark, where there is no room for contemplation and self-analysis, or the guttering realisation of all she's lost.    
  
Later, she's alone, toasting his memory with another bitter glass of wine and a mumbled string of obscenities. She revels in the numbness which finally comes over her, doesn't even care when she sleeps right there on the sofa like a wayward adolescent, her slippers falling from her feet. 

 

.....

  
In the morning, Julia realises this can't go on.   
  
She despises who she was to end up in this isolated mess, but she despises even more who she has become.   
  
In the end it's simple, really. She thinks it's funny that she didn't see it coming, was so caught up in the minutiae of feeling she had no escape that she missed the hulking great exit sign in front of her. A final way out.   
  
Julia resigns in mid-October to the sound of uproar and general chaos bursting the dams.    
  
But it's easier than she thought it would be, walking away. From a lifetime's work, no less. She's left them all an utter shitstorm to clean up after she goes, but that makes it all the more satisfying when she does. A two-fingered salute to the bloodsucking parasites they've been on her life for the past two decades. She wonders, briefly, if she'd still be colourful if she'd never met Roger Penhaligon, never donned that suit and tie which is the armour of their world.   
  
But then she'd never have met him either, and even after it all she cannot bring herself to regret knowing him.   
  
Even if the only colour he's left her is the precise shade of a new-cut bruise, spreading out in unforgiving purple through tender capillaries, through fragile skin.   
  
She sits in the park the morning after she resigns. Takes a breath. It's autumn again and the trees are changing and little flakes of gold line up around her and remind her that not everything is shades of grey.   
  
She thinks she might enjoy being unemployed.

  
.....

  
  
Weeks pass like falling leaves.   
  
It's funny, now she's not Home Secretary she has no minders, no guardians, no restrictions, just herself and her head full of thoughts. And today, a shopping trolley, lined with the mundanity of life. She revels in it, this feeling of finally, finally passing unobserved, a bystander instead of the show.   
  
The corners of her mouth turn down when someone crashes into the side of her trolley, the metal on metal grating and loud. An interruption to the pleasing steadiness of her thoughts.   
  
She opens her mouth to deliver a cutting word or twenty in retribution, until she turns and locks eyes with her latest assailant. She looks on for a hard moment.   
  
"You don't shop here," she says bluntly.   
  
He leans over the handle of his trolley, and studies her. His hair is short.   
  
"No," he agrees. "But you do."  
  
She isn't sure whether to force herself through a polite conversation before taking her leave, or to simply back right up and ram her own trolley into his until he leaves her alone again. Dimly she recognises that she is angry, outraged that he can appear like a ghost out of the grave like this and still set her mind to racing, the carefully cultivated calm she's spent months building falling in pieces on a shiny supermarket floor.   
  
But she gives nothing away, and simply delivers a withering look before she turns her attention back to the bright orange peppers she had been scrutinising in the first place. She thinks maybe if she doesn't look at him, the ugly cracks she's spent months papering over will stay deeply buried in the dark within.   
  
When she's finished shopping and her groceries are packed up in neat brown bags, she starts off down the road towards her flat.   
  
She feels his approach behind her, feels his fingers brush the side of her hand as she takes half the bags from her. She doesn't find the words to protest in time.   
  
She tries not to let herself glance over at him and to make herself walk steadily, slowly, to not let anything on the outside reveal the struggle within.   
  
"Does Vicky know you're here?" she asks flatly. She thinks if she were Vicky she'd mind, him coming here and carrying her shopping and walking her home. Although, she thinks, there's something geriatric about that concept, so maybe Vicky doesn't mind at all. Maybe she knows, and this is some strange courtesy, an act of pity or maybe penance, for some ill-defined sin. Her fingers tighten on the remaining bags.  
  
"Vicky?" he sounds genuinely perplexed. "No, I don't think so. It's not my turn with the kids."   
  
She glances at him then, and her rapid recalculation must be written all over her face. There's a dawning realisation on his.   
  
"You read that article," he says, frowning. "Sorry. I should have said something."  
  
"My PPO gave it to me," she says irritably. "It's your business; I'm pleased your children have their family back."  
  
"No," he says, and she senses rather than sees the furrowing of his brow. "We aren't together, Vic and I," he says. "We never were, Julia, it was just a stupid story in the paper. I swear."  
  
She glances fleetingly at him, allowing herself to look only somewhere around shoulder height, and reminds herself that it's of no consequence to her either way. She has no claim on him, and more to the point, he has no claim on her.   
  
"It's nothing to me," she says waspishly. The lie sits heavy between them.   
  
They reach her front door and Julia doesn't bother stopping him from following her in. She leaves the door ajar and sets her bags down on the table, leaving him to shut it and join her in the kitchen.  
  
Things have changed since she was the one following him in.  
  
"I didn't resign because of you," she says bluntly, fetching herself a glass of icy water. She leans against the countertop.  
  
"No," he says. "I never thought you did."  
  
"It's just I've moved on," she explains, and wonders if it sounds any less unconvincing to him than it does to her.   
  
"As you should," he agrees. He takes a step towards her and she immediately straightens, her fingers clenching around her glass. He stops, and for the first time since the trolley she lets herself look up at his face.   
  
She hates the fact that it feels like all the wind has simultaneously entered and left her lungs all at once.  
  
He is all blue-eyed sadness and it cuts through her bravado like a hot knife.   
  
She looks away, starts to unpack, dumping potatoes and pasta in the cupboard, and she eyes a bottle of red with longing, but she's determined to be better than that. He starts to pass her things to put into the fridge.   
  
"I've thought about you," he ventures, handing her a pint of milk. It sounds rough, a sound reluctantly forced from his throat. "Never really make it through a day without thinking about you, actually."  
  
"You chose this," she reminds him sharply, her voice clipped and precise. She is walking an intricate line on thin ice, and she feels the flush of danger swelling under her feet. If she had sense she'd turn him out right now, before he gets under her skin; in reality she is weak, and she longs to hear his regret, and it's too late anyway. He's been under her skin since October 4th. "I asked you to choose me, but you didn't then. I don't know why you're here now."  
  
He doesn't have an answer; the tense line of his shoulders gives it away. He reaches for her arm, but she shifts it away in defiance.   
  
"Can I at least see you again?" he asks, and she narrows her eyes at him.  
  
"I never asked to see you this time. It doesn't seem to matter what I think, so I daresay you can."  
  
She wonders if he knows what she's trying to say is yes. 

  
.....

  
  
She doesn't see him for thirteen days after that. As much as she tries not to count, her mind does it anyway, and she starts to resign herself to the fact that maybe the gulf between them was just too wide. Her words too barbed and his hope too thin.   
  
He turns up at her flat unannounced on a Tuesday evening.   
  
She's still not working, but she's been out all afternoon, trying her best to rejoin the world. She finds him waiting in the hall with his hands shoved in his trouser pockets and a bag of cooling takeaway beside him.   
  
"I was starting to think you'd moved to get away from me," he says carefully, and she just looks at him for a second.   
  
She doesn't say anything, but opens the door and lets him follow her in. It's becoming a habit and she knows when it comes to him her habits are hard to break.    
  
"Where were you?" he asks, conversationally.   
  
"My therapist's," she answers bluntly, handing him plates and not even bothering to lie. It's the refreshing thing about no longer being a politician; the truth is so much easier to express.   
  
He is obviously surprised by her answer; those storm blue eyes flick back to hers sharply, and he pauses with a spoonful of curry hovering over her plate. She smiles harshly.  
  
"You're not the only one who's fucked up, David," she says sardonically. She realises then that it's the first time she's actually vocalised his name since the night she asked him to leave, since he's been anything other than "him", and it tastes like a forbidden word on her tongue. She glances away but if he notices he doesn't say.   
  
"I suppose almost getting shot and blown up will do that to you," he says carefully. She purses her lips, inspects a tiny pull on her white blouse.   
  
"I'm sure you know it's not just that," she says. "It's a lot of things. From long before your time, so don't worry."   
  
"I'm glad you're getting help," he says after a calculating pause. He studies her for a second. "I am too," he adds. "In fact, my psych's the one that said I ought to-" he pauses again "-look for closure with you. One way or the other."  
  
"Oh, is that what this is? A psychiatric exercise" Julia says mildly. "I did wonder."  
  
He looks at her pointedly as if to say she knows she should be better than this. "You know it's not," he says, and his tone cuts straight through her bullshit. She inclines her head grudgingly.   
  
They sit on opposite armchairs around her coffee table, and watch a trashy show that's airing on Channel 4. They don't speak, but occasionally Julia glances at him, and when she reaches inside herself to examine her feelings she wonders if maybe she's running out of anger to hold against him after all.   
  
They don't touch, not even when he says goodnight and heads for the door. She follows gingerly, keeping back like he's a fire and she's afraid to get burnt. _Once bitten, twice sh_ y, she thinks, and wills herself not to get attached.   
  
Yet she never turns him away. Not the next time he comes by, or the next, or the next, or the next.   
  
It's mostly in the evenings; a shared meal, sometimes he brings it, other times she makes something in her barely-used kitchen, just about remembering how to make food edible and serve it on two plates. As she does she notices a crack in the edge of one and wonders whether or not it's the kind of crack that actually runs right through the core of it and inevitably leads to total destruction. 

Or maybe, she supposes, a crack is just a crack.    
  
They don't talk much. He seems to be waiting for her to do the lead in, but she never does. But she stops sitting in the uncomfortable armchair after a few visits, and returns to the sofa where they sit side by side. It's the closest they've come to touching, and for a while this seems okay. 

  
.....

  
  
One night Julia awakes with a cold sweat on her brow and a terrified cry stifled on her lips.   
  
She's struggled through a shallow sleep full of gunshots and her driver's blood, and she desperately wishes she had someone to tell. But she rolls over into empty space.  
  
Weary and weak, she pads into the living room, turns the light on since there's no one here but her. Finds her phone, taps in the number. It's like clockwork.   
  
_I dreamt about Thornton Circus_ , she types in bald, black letters. _I'm scared_.   
  
She frowns, looks down, sighs heavily. Deletes the message and starts again.   
  
_Come over tomorrow. Dinnertime_.  
  
She scrutinises. Changes the first full stop to a question mark and thinks she shouldn't always be ordering him around.   
  
She jumps violently when her phone buzzes a few minutes later.   
  
_Up late or up early?_    
  
She dithers over whether or not to respond, to engage with this and let herself invest a little bit further than she already has.   
  
_Bad dreams_ , she writes, unable to resist. At least he understands.   
  
_I'm with you_.   
  
She ponders whether he just means he has bad dreams too, or if he's offering moral support, or the nebulous but far more intimate notion that he's with her, _really_ with her, and on her side, even by her side.   
  
She doesn't write back but when she goes to sleep she finds she's comforted. Whether it's a good idea or not, she can feel herself opening her heart again. 

 

.....

  
Repairing something broken is slow and uncertain. She starts to realise it's never clear whether you'll end up with what you started with, or something different altogether.   
  
Or if you'll still want the thing after it's mended.   
  
Or if it's just beyond all repair anyway.   
  
It's been weeks since the shopping trolley and she still doesn't touch him. She doesn't think he'd object if she did, but he's been wary of her boundaries. Even sitting beside her on the sofa he maintains a careful gap between them.   
  
Then eleven weeks and three days after he re-enters her life, she touches him again.   
  
It's not really intentional. She's just got used to him being there on a Friday night, and in a state of drowsiness it feels natural to rest her head on his shoulder as they sit there watching a late-night film. He's started coming by more often recently, and she realises that slowly, they've come full circle and once again she's begun to associate his presence with safety and not with pain. 

She sleeps better on nights when he’s been there.  
  
She feels him start slightly when her cheek touches his shoulder, and she feels his hesitation as he tenses, then relaxes, and slowly, as carefully as if she were a wild animal about to bolt, he raises his right arm and places it gently around her shoulders.   
  
She sighs. There's an inevitability about it all that makes her want to surrender.   
  
By the time the film is finished she's almost asleep on his shoulder, one of her arms curled up against his chest. His arm is still around her and dimly she hears him whisper against her hair.  
  
"I'm sorry I left you."   
  
She's too tired, too close to sleep to answer him, just murmurs something that makes no sense and twists so she's more decisively tucked under his chin. The last thing she hears is him laughing softly, and brushing a whisper of a kiss to the top of her head.   
  
In the morning she finds herself in her bed, still wearing the comfortable clothes she was wearing the night before, but cocooned in blankets and feeling more rested than she has in weeks.   
  
She walks into the living room, looks around. He's not there, of course, as he shouldn't be. But there's an undeniable part of her that wishes he was.   
  
She's showered, fed and dressed when he calls her. Her phone makes her jump, because hardly anyone calls her anymore. A few old friends, a few scheming politicians, her mother on special occasions. And now him. She studies the caller details: PS Budd, no picture, flashing on her screen.

She slides to green.   
  
"Hello," she says awkwardly, feeling inexplicably shy for the first time in about three decades.   
  
"Hi." It sounds like he's out; the background noise is busy and bustling. "Can you meet me?"   
  
She pauses, considers. "Where?"  
  
"Woodford Green."  
  
It's far, but she goes anyway. A change of scenery is good for her, she thinks. And it's probably time she gets back into work, whatever that might be now. Time off from time off has started to become appealing again, and she’s never been the idle sort.   
  
On the way, she changes his name back to 'David' in her phone.   
  
He's wearing dark jeans and a dark green jumper, and she feels that familiar flutter deep inside herself when he smiles at her. Tentatively, she smiles back.   
  
"These aren't for you," he says as she approaches. He's holding two bouquets of white and blue flowers, tied neatly with silver string.  
  
"Charming," she says, raising her eyebrows. He just smiles as they walk side by side, their hands occasionally brushing as they weave past Saturday morning crowds. She's tempted to reach out and take his, but some hesitancy holds her back.   
  
He leads them to a church, very traditional with steeple and courtyard and all the rest. She glances at him in surprise. Religion is not something she associates with him.   
  
But he takes her round the back, not to the church but to where the burial ground lies, and she starts to realise where this is going. She looks at him properly, then. He looks tense, but resolved, his face open instead of guarded and enigmatic. That's a change that she's noticed in him in these long weeks; inscrutable is no longer top of her list of descriptors for him. He is much more willing to express.   
  
They stop beside a pair of graves, a little weathered but much newer than many of the stones around them.   
_  
Joshua Paul Carter, 1987-2009  
  
Thomas Michael Carter, 1990-2009_  
  
He looks at her. "They were brothers. Died within three months of each other in Helmand. Tom was shot dead at a vehicle checkpoint. Wasn't even twenty yet. Then Josh got blown up trying to stop a suicide bomber from hitting a civilian marketplace."  
  
"Did you know them well?"  
  
"I served alongside Tom. Knew Josh through him, but we weren’t in the same unit. They were both good blokes. Not that it mattered in the end. You die just as alone out there no matter how many mates you've got." He looks down, takes in a deep breath. "I visited their mother. After I came back, and they didn't. She was alone, her husband was already dead and they were her only kids. She asked me why I had made it back and they didn't."   
  
He shakes his head, jaw muscles working, and it is impossible. She reaches out and takes his free hand, as the only thing she can do.   
  
He looks at her, and she sees the shadow behind his eyes.  
  
"She didn't mean it like that. She was grieving. But I stopped being able to speak about them, or anyone, because I ended up thinking the same thing every single day. I kept it all locked up tight. It's what ruined me and Vic in the end - well, you've already seen what it can be like. It was never her fault, she tried harder than anyone to get me help, but I couldn't. I didn't think I'd survive having to live it all again.”  
  
"And then I met you," he says, and his fingers tighten around hers. "And it was like everything I thought I knew was turned on its head. And when we were together, when you asked me to be with you, I hadn't even started to work through any of that. I could never have made it work with you back then."  
  
Her jaw clenches as she nods. His words are painful but she can only nod, knowing that what he says is truth. She realises that maybe she's known all along, and perhaps even right back then, that despite their tender words they were spinning in different orbits, destined to fall apart.   
  
"And now?" she manages to say. He turns to face her fully, turning his hand over in his.    
  
"I'm not fixed. I don't think there's such a thing as that, not for someone like me. I'll probably always be messed up. I've got doubts and a lot to work through and I'm… afraid," he pauses, takes a breath. "But I know that I'm so much better for having you in my life. And I don't want you out of it. Not ever again."  
  
It's as close to a declaration two people as fucked up as them are ever going to get. It's messy and it's fractured, and it's taking place beside the still-bright gravestones of two brave young men no one could deny deserved better. And she feels the loosening of a thorn that's been lingering in her flesh since the day he left.   
  
"I don't want that either," she says. He lifts her hand to his lips, smiles with such warmth, and his eyes remind her of spring again.    
  
He hands her a bouquet which she lays carefully on Joshua's grave, and she says a silent prayer, of sorts, to both these boys, whose lives were given up to a cause she was part of.   
  
When they leave the church she doesn't let go of his hand as they walk away.

She sits beside him on the train, and suddenly they’re gliding out into the unknown, and fresh into hope.

 

 


End file.
